The philosopher Martha Nussbaum asks, in Luck and Ethics, "To what extent can we distinguish between what is up to the world and what is up to us, when assessing a human life?" An analysis of this problem in the lives of two characters from Aeschylus's Choephori, the second of his Oresteia trilogy, will address the question of fate versus personal freedom and how fate affects their lives. Clytemnestra and her son Orestes are caught up in a family tragedy of murder and revenge that demonstrates, as Orestes says, that "The designs of heaven / Weave man into a pattern" (138). Clytemnestra's partial justification for killing her husband Agamemnon was his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia and this, of course, was done at the command of Artemis. In this sense, therefore, this strand of the tragic curse of the house of Atreus could be said to originate in the demands of the gods and their "designs" seem to preclude any absolute freedom on the part of the human actors.
The essential problem, of course, is that Agamemnon and his companions could simply have refused this request. Yet they had been compelled to undertake the war against Troy because of the demands of the gods and they were damned if they did and damned if they did not. Clytemnestra could, therefore, have placed the blame for her daughter's death on Artemis. But Clytemnestra had other reasons for killing Agamemnon that were more significant to her and, in any event, were also the only ones that Orestes, Electra and the Chorus acknowledge in the Choephori. Clytemnestra was driven by her jealousy toward her husband's concubine, Cassandra, and by her desire for her own lover, Aegisthus. Clytemnestra says "Do not blame me, I was in the hand of Fate" yet her claim that it was the general curse on the house of Atreus that caused her to act as she did is untenable (135). Thus the essential responsibility for the acts that start the chain of consequences addressed in th...